Fragments

Abstract

Perhaps the largest change facing Android developers in 2011 was the introduction of the fragment system with Android 3.0, and the recent merging of the fragment system into the main code base with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Fragments are an optional layer you can put between your activities and your widgets, designed to help you reconfigure your activities to support screens both large (e.g., tablets) and small (e.g., phones). However, the fragment system also adds an extra layer of complexity, one that will take the Android developer community some time to adjust to. Hence, the public comments, blog posts, and sample apps using fragments are a little rarer, because fragments were introduced so long after Android itself was.